France orders Twitter to identify racist tweeters

A French court ruled Thursday that Twitter, which has steadfastly refused calls to police its millions of users, must hand over data to help identify the authors of racist or anti-Semitic tweets.

In a test case that pitted the right to free speech against laws banning hate speech, the court granted a request lodged in October by France’s Union of Jewish Students (UEJF) which argued that many tweets had breached French law.

The union had been pressing Twitter to exercise tighter control of what appeared on its Internet site following a deluge of anti-Semitic messages posted.

Twitter later removed some of the offending tweets.

In October, Twitter suspended the account of a neo-Nazi group in Germany following a request from the government in Berlin.

That was the first time that the US firm had applied a policy known as “country-withheld content”. which allows it to block an account at the request of state authorities.